2009-10 McBaine Problem
The case for the competition is Lee v. Louisiana and competitors will address the following question: Whether the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial, as applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, allows a criminal conviction based on a non-unanimous jury verdict.
In addition to the Lee v. Louisiana case, competitors will also address the problem as if it had been consolidated with two similar cases– Bertrand v. Louisiana, No. 09-0409 [though this case is real, this docket number was assigned for the purposes of the competition only; all other docket numbers and citations are real docket numbers], and Bowen v. Oregon, No. 08-1117. This puts Oregon and Louisiana law squarely at issue as to the constitutionality of non-unanimous jury convictions in criminal cases.